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Oct. 26, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
41:03
BREAKING: Era of Big Tech Over? Big Threat to Tech Monopoly Emerges | Direct Message | Rubin Report
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dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Alright, alright, alright!
I am Dave Rubin.
This is the Rubin Report Direct Message.
Today is Tuesday, October 26, 2021.
And today is a day that will live in infamy forever.
And today is a day that will live in infamy forever if you are a big tech oligarch,
because most of you have probably heard the news already.
We've got some fantastic information to share, which is that rumble.
Rumble video.
Rumble.com, which we are streaming on right now, including YouTube and including BlazeTV.
Has acquired my tech company, Locals.com.
This is a massive, massive shift in the social media ecosystem.
And I'm not just saying it because I started Locals.
The real resistance Not the fake resistance that the other guys have been running with, this fake resistance where they've got the media, they've got big tech, they've got all the institutions, and they're also the resistance?
No.
The real resistance, the real people that are fighting for free speech online, fighting for our ability to share ideas, fighting to have technological answers as big tech censors us and de-boosts us and shadow bans us and everything else that they're doing.
As I always say to you guys, it's not the stuff that I know that they're doing I'm worried about, it's always the stuff that I don't know that they're doing that I'm really worried about.
Well, today is a great day.
We have decided to sell Locals to Rumble.
Rumble is run by a spectacular group of people.
I'll tell you all the history of all of this.
I'm gonna take your questions, by the way, if you wanna join us right now at reubenreport.locals.com.
You can submit questions.
I'll try to get to as many as possible.
I'm going to be as transparent and open as humanly possible about the deal, about my relationship with Rumble going forward, how we're going to structure this and how the companies will remain separate but still be able to share resources and why we're so mission aligned and all of that.
But Rumble's really run by some spectacular people.
Chris, who runs Rumble Wellasoff who is my business partner and locals about four or five months ago we went to Miami to sit down with him for dinner just to talk about having a partnership just to be like hey could we you know do a few different things together there you know there's obviously some interesting touch points here and you know maybe there's a bigger opportunity down down the line we literally sat down for dinner and before the wine bottle was even uncorked Chris said hey
We wanna buy you guys, we wanna acquire you guys.
And for the last five months roughly, it's even more than that, I think this started probably in May or so, we've been trying to tie all of that together.
And I can tell you as someone that didn't intend on starting a tech company, that there's a whole lot of stuff involved, not only in building a tech company, but selling a tech company.
And I couldn't be prouder of what we've done here.
You know, I always knew, From when we started Locals, that this was just a piece of the bigger puzzle, right?
Like there were gonna have to be so many interesting, new, innovative companies that were gonna have to come and have technological answers and we're gonna have to deal with all of the free speech issues and the censorship issues honestly and forthrightly and all of those things.
And I also knew that it was just gonna keep getting worse.
You know, when I started this company, which was three years ago, it was basically three years ago in December, December 2018.
And I'll tell you why I started it for those of you that may not remember or weren't on board this crazy adventure at the time.
But when I started, I knew that we were just gonna build a part of what the solution was gonna be,
and that eventually we would partner up with other people who were doing cool things.
And that's exactly where we are at today, which is why I am so thrilled to announce
that we are partnering up and have been acquired by Rumble.
It's not only Chris over there, who's run an incredible team,
and he's been running this company for years sort of under the radar, building an incredible,
truly an incredible infrastructure that is going to replace Amazon AWS.
You know, I know everybody's worried about, well, Dave, what about Parler?
That was the big thing that I heard over the last year.
You know, you've done so many interesting things with locals and you got live video streaming and the unmanipulated newsfeed and we're liking and we can live chat and all of that stuff.
But what about the servers?
What about the servers?
Well, we did some things on the back end that are a little too insider baseball to get into, but Rumble has truly built The infrastructure for the what I would say is the parallel ecosystem that we are going to build we are going to build a parallel
Ecosystem outside of big tech, where there will be video, there will be audio, there will be the ability for you guys to communicate back and forth.
We're going to have subscription models.
We're going, there will be ads, you know, everything, everything that exists, we're going to replicate, but do it right and do it better and do it not to manipulate you or to sell your data or to decide what you can and can't say, right?
That's not the business that I'm in.
It's not the business that I want to be in.
You, If you don't break the laws of the United States, you're basically okay.
You know, if you break the laws of the United States, you got a bigger problem than Dave Rubin.
All right, so that's our basic mission.
But not only has Chris built some incredible tech here, but you know, Dan Bongino, who I truly hold in like the highest possible regard as one of the people involved in this political Sort of disaster that we're all in, right?
We're all in this like political meltdown right now.
And there are a couple people who are not only talking about the right ideas to get out of it, but doing the right things, actually building the right things.
So Dan is a part of Rumble.
Dan and I will be working together to be the public voices of Rumble and of Locals as we go down the line and try to solve all of the problems.
that the internet has right now, whether it's payment processors,
whether it's censorship, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'm thrilled to be doing that.
A couple of things before I get into some of the nitty gritty in the history, and as I said,
you can submit as many questions as you want.
You can ask me as personal stuff, specifics on the deal, et cetera, at rubinreport.locals.com.
And I already did a Locals exclusive live stream this morning.
So for those of you that watched that, I know some of this will be a little bit repetitive, but I want to get as much information out as possible.
I also want to be as transparent as possible.
You know, that was one of the big things that when we sat down with Chris and we sat down with Dan, it's like, we've all seen the mistakes of 20 years of the internet.
And I'm not calling all of these guys evil, you know what I mean?
Like, that's one of the things I try when I talk about Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey from Twitter and all of these guys.
It's like, I think they all got into something that they didn't know what the hell they were getting into.
And then I think these things became just too big and unmanageable.
And did they make some bad decisions?
Was there probably some nefarious activity?
Is there a lot of wokeness involved that allows them to do all sorts of bad things?
And do they maybe not even know all of the bad things?
that their companies are doing, yes, that is all true.
But now it's like we can learn from their mistakes.
That's the beautiful thing right now.
We can learn from the mistakes of 20 years of giant companies that made you the product.
We do not want you to be the product at Rumble or at Locals.
And that is gonna be a key to everything we're doing.
So when I've sat down with Asaf, who as I said was the architect of Locals,
and when we sat down with Chris who started Rumble, and we sat down with Bongino,
it's like we're gonna do everything we can to sort of build not only a parallel ecosystem,
but a mature ecosystem.
You know, what do I say all the time?
It's like build new things.
Build new things, and nobody does it.
Everyone just complains.
But there were a couple people out there building new things, and that's exactly why
we thought that this was the right deal.
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And now back to me.
Okay, so obviously a ton to get to here.
So as I said, we've been working on this deal for about five months.
Let me tell you also that we had other deals.
We had people offer us all cash to buy the company.
There's obviously been a lot going on here.
One of the interesting things just sort of generally about what's happened sort of in the zeitgeist
in the last year is when the events of January 6th happened and then Parler was blown up,
which actually was much more of a threat in my opinion to free speech, the destruction of Parler
rather than the silliness that happened for the most part on the 6th itself at the Capitol,
which of course is not to deny that anything bad happened and the people that broke the law should be dealt with
and all of that stuff, okay.
But the greater threat to American values and free speech and your ability to speak your mind
was that Amazon blew up the competition.
All of big tech, they said, "We're gonna destroy Parler.
"Parler's got 23 million users.
"We don't like them.
"This is the perfect excuse."
Now, ironically, it turned out that more people had coordinated the events of January 6th.
On Facebook, then on Parler.
But, you know, this is sort of a mafia game.
They're not going to blow themselves up.
So they blew up Parler.
What that then caused was the average person to go, well, OK, it doesn't matter what I think politically, but just blowing up websites, that that doesn't seem very safe.
That doesn't seem good for anybody that might have a unique point of view or might just want to speak freely or, you know, might just, you know, occasionally say something that's not totally politically correct.
And what that allowed was sort of a movement where suddenly people who were not looking
to invest in things suddenly decided to invest in things.
It really helped our growth on the local side.
But really, as I said before about Rumble, it's like they're ensuring
they have built the infrastructure.
It's built already.
This is not like, oh, we're gonna build this stuff in five years.
They are building the new infrastructure and have built the new infrastructure
so that your websites will stay online.
So that if you say that you're against mask mandates, you don't have to worry
that Amazon's gonna blow up your server.
So that if you say that, you know, let's say you like this guy, Brandon.
You know, there's some guy Brandon in your town and he's walking by and you're like, let's go, Brandon.
Well, you know that your website's not going to get blown up, blown apart.
So there were many reasons that we wanted to come together on this front.
And I want to just back up a little bit to December of 2018, which is basically three years ago when I when I first sort of got the idea for Locals.
You know, I was on tour with Jordan Peterson at the time.
We were at the tail end of the tour.
We had done about 100 stops.
We had about 10 or 15 shows to go, mostly in Australia, which, unfortunately, it doesn't look like any freedom-loving person is going to Australia anytime soon.
Little did we know that was going to happen three years later.
But it was December of 2018 and I was on Patreon at the time.
That's where I was doing the crowdsourcing, the subscription model for my show.
We were doing quite well on there.
I was one of the first, if not the first political guy on there.
You know, it was mostly like gamers and that sort of thing.
But I had gone independent.
I had left, you know, I had started The Young Turks.
I had eventually moved over to Ora TV.
I left the networks.
I wanted to go independent.
I wanted to build my own home studio and all of these things.
And I was on Patreon.
We were doing well.
I had built a company.
I had several employees.
We were making like 30 grand a month.
It was great.
Everything was good.
And then one day in December of 2018, a guy that I'm sure many of you are familiar with by the name of Sargon of Akkad, Carl Benjamin over in the UK, he was kicked off Patreon out of nowhere.
I was on the road with Jordan Peterson at the time when I saw it.
I remember I was doing cardio in the hotel and I saw it and I could not believe it.
And what basically had happened was that Carl had said the N-word, but not on his YouTube channel, nor on his Patreon.
He had said it on someone else's channel.
And he also did not say it to be racist.
He said it because he was mocking the very racist people who use words like that.
Patreon did not care.
They did not send him any warning.
They just blew up his Patreon channel, which was his main source of income.
They didn't say, oh, can you clarify this?
Or, oh, you didn't do this on your YouTube channel or your Patreon?
You did it.
Basically, in the privacy of your own life, you did on somebody else's channel just talking, or that it wasn't racist in the first place.
Anyway, to Jordan and I, that was such a drastic escalation of what had happened, of what was going on with big tech.
We all knew about shadow bans, and that at times, you know, your tweets just aren't seen, or we had all known about Videos not going out to YouTube when you put up a live stream or you put up new videos or subscribers dropping out of nowhere or every day I would wake up and people would be emailing me, Dave, I don't see your videos.
Like we had known all of that stuff, right?
And it was unfolding in front of our eyes.
And sometimes, you know, when all of these weird things are happening and they're de-boosting things and, you know, they say that they're unmanipulating search results as they manipulate them, all of this crazy stuff, it's like it's hard to keep up with it.
You sort of feel like a conspiracy theorist.
It's like a lot to deal with at once.
Anyway, this one was such a direct assault on freedom of speech, because it wasn't just that he didn't say the word to be racist, he didn't even do it on Patreon.
And he didn't even do it on YouTube that Patreon was funding, right?
So we immediately agreed that we were going to leave Patreon.
We didn't know exactly how we were going to do it, as it was about 90% of my company's revenue at the time.
And I went to my brother-in-law, Asaf, who's a product guy, and I said, look, I need you to build me a subscription page so that I can get off Patreon.
Jordan and I decided to leave Patreon, then Sam Harris left Patreon, a couple other big people did, and I believe it was on January 15th, 2019, if I'm not mistaken, that I officially left Patreon, and we launched what was literally just one page.
It was just a page on rubinreport.com just saying you could subscribe.
Just subscribe to Dave Rubin and, you know, throw in a couple bucks.
I think the minimum at that time was $3.
Throw in a couple bucks and you will help Dave not be so beholden to big tech.
Well, once we did that and overnight, I think our revenue jumped by about 30% because people respect when you stand up for the right things.
We thought, well, hold on.
Now we maybe have something here.
If we can solve some of my problems as a creator, we can solve all sorts of problems for all sorts of people.
Not just political people or not just people that I agree with, but for gamers and unboxers and all of the other people who are doing all the weird things online.
Like maybe we can solve a lot of their problems as well.
And that really was where the beginnings of Locals began.
And then I did a live stream saying that, you know, we were thinking about building something.
And if you wanna understand really how cool this is, how this adventure that I've been on
has just been absolutely extraordinary.
I did a live stream just saying, you know, we started, we didn't even have a company yet, actually.
I don't even think we even had an LLC yet, but I said, you know, we're starting something here.
We think there's an opportunity to build video for people and audio and have a home that's yours and, you know, build a slick app so you can get push notifications and eventually we'll have live stream, all of this stuff.
And I'm just like babbling on a two hour live stream.
And I said, you know, boy, if I knew some billionaires right now, that would be helpful.
If I knew some people that could invest in this sort of thing, that could be helpful.
And a guy by the name of Andrew sent me an email.
I saw an email from a guy named Andrew.
Hey, you're looking for a billionaire.
And Andrew showed up and wrote the first check for locals.
And that began the process.
And then after that, as we raised funds over the last couple of years, a couple people, most notably Warren and Mark, shout out to you guys as well as Andrew and a few others, that were just viewers of mine, that were just, People who enjoyed what I did, who liked the things that I was talking about, also became investors.
And I think this is going to work out pretty well for you guys.
So I think it's pretty fantastic.
And then along the way, very cool things kept happening.
Back in last December, I was in Miami with Asafa and we're sitting at a table with investors.
And I should tell you guys that we had gone to Silicon Valley like two and a half years ago before it had completely melted down in San Francisco and everybody has now escaped and left.
But we had gone to raise funds and we went into every office.
Like, name a VC firm.
We went into every single office.
Great pitches, our docs were great.
You know, I'm a pretty decent talker.
We knew what we were talking about.
And basically everybody turned us down, not because anyone had a problem
with the mission, not because anyone had a problem with the tech that we built,
not because anyone had a problem with us, but basically every single person on the DL,
very few would put it in an email, would say, you know, this is great and we do kinda need this,
and yeah, YouTube's kinda evil, and Twitter's horrible and all that.
But, you know, this is sort of conservative.
It seems like, you know, you're conservative, Dave.
You're sort of scary and the creators, they seem to lean a little right.
And that could be dangerous for us.
I cannot tell you how many times we heard that, but we just kept going.
We just kept going and going and building and not taking no for an answer.
And the company kept growing and our growth was spectacular and our feature set kept growing
and more and more good kept happening.
And by the way, as we were doing that, that's exactly what Rumble was doing on their side.
So these things were just kind of moving up together at the same time and that's a pretty beautiful thing.
So I wanna be clear about a couple things here that's very important.
So yes, Locals is being 100% or has been 100% acquired by Rumble.
It was a stock deal, so I'm not walking out with the whole boatload of cash,
but I believe in this company.
I believe that there's huge opportunity in the future.
And I think this is the right decision, not only for me and for my family,
but for the growth of what we are trying to do to actually build something
that will fight against big tech.
That being said, Locals will continue to basically run independently.
Although it will be part of Rumble, Asaph will continue to run Locals.
We are here for creators.
We want to be the platform for creators to be completely independent, to own their data,
to own their content, to be able to communicate directly with their audience.
If you're watching this and you're on Patreon, get on Locals, get on Locals.
We have a much better product, a slick app with live streaming and live chat and push notifications
and all of those things.
So what this does though is allow us to have way more resources.
It allows us to have the awesome technological underside that Rumble is providing and it allows us
to further that ecosystem.
So you can sort of think about it roughly like in the way that Facebook bought Instagram.
Now, they're obviously two separate brands, but they work together in all sorts of ways.
You may not like exactly how they work together, but meaning that they're separate companies, but obviously they're working together.
They're sharing all sorts of resources and everything else.
That's the way we plan on doing this.
I am sticking around, by the way, so I want to be 100% clear on that as well.
I could have done a deal here and there was some talk about it.
I could have done a deal where I would just walk, that I would basically just sell the company for stock
and I'd walk and hopefully one day the stock does great and I've saved myself a lot of meetings and everything else
'cause in the last three years I would say, believe it or not, probably more than half of my workday
has been spent on local stuff, more than even doing the Rubin Report.
I know that may sound almost impossible, but the amount of investor meetings, the amount of onboarding of creators, the amount of talking to lawyers about policy and everything else that I've done, that's sort of how my life's been for the last couple years.
I've actually loved every second of it.
I didn't know I was going to love it.
I didn't intend on becoming a tech guy, but because it's so closely associated with everything that I talk about here, It just, it felt great.
But in any event, I could've just walked, right?
Like, today's announcement could be, you know, we sold it, and you know, Rumble's taken over, and Asaf's gonna go get a new job, and you know, I'm out, I did what I could.
But that's not what we wanted to do.
We wanted to not only continue to build Locals, and as I said, make it the premier place for creators online.
You should not be on Patreon if you're on there.
You're just on another big tech thing, which has almost no feature set, by the way.
All they're doing is taking care of your monthly subscriptions.
Like, let us do it and we'll give you a whole bunch more.
Okay, that's my sales pitch on that.
But I am sticking around.
I am gonna be a salaried employee of Rumble.
To be very clear, in the first two years with Locals, I didn't take a dime.
I actually put money in and put a lot of time in, obviously, this last year I took a very nominal salary.
But I will be a salaried employee.
I'm sticking around.
I, alongside Dan Bongino, want to be the public people that are fighting for the right ideas related to freedom of speech online.
We will do our best, and I really mean this, we will do our best to be as transparent as we can about our policies.
And what we're doing, you know, I say this all the time, but it's like, if you're on Gmail, most of us have a Gmail account.
Imagine you just had a problem with Gmail.
You couldn't get in, you're locked out, anything, just something's not working.
It doesn't seem like your emails are moving, I don't know, whatever.
It's like, there's nobody on the phone to talk to, is there?
There's nobody to get through over there.
And it's like, we want to build a much better company.
If you had a problem with Twitter, who you gonna call?
Right?
Right?
It's like, You'd have a better chance at Call of the Ghostbusters, honestly, than getting in touch with anyone at Twitter.
So we want to be the people, Dan and I, that are leading the fight.
You know, I've said for so long I like people that build things.
I got sick.
I really got sick of just talking about problems.
You can watch my old shows, and I'm sure some of you remember this,
where we'd be talking about free speech, we'd be talking about big tech,
and I'd have great, thoughtful people on, and you could feel the frustration.
It was like, well, nothing's getting better.
Nothing's getting better.
Why don't we build this?
And just for the record, several people that were former guests on the room
I did offer pieces of locals if they would get involved and work with us, and a lot of people are not looking very bright today.
So, but it's all good.
It's really, it's all good.
I'm super excited.
Okay, so let me take a couple questions.
There are obviously a few other things that I want to hit on.
Oh, I started telling you, just real quick, I started telling you about this meeting back in December.
So in December I'm sitting around this table in Miami with a bunch of investors and we're trying to raise money for locals.
And I did something that I don't know that any investor in the history of tech has ever done.
We're sitting at this table.
I post in my locals community.
I say, hey guys, I'm at an investor dinner here in Miami.
Could you guys just comment on why you like locals?
Be as brutally honest as you want.
Whatever you wanna say, go ahead.
I posted that.
Now people get push notifications on their phones.
So several hundred people started commenting.
I did not even look, I swear to you.
I did not even look at the phone.
I just handed my phone around the table and got all these investors to look at the comments
and we walked out of there with investors, okay?
So when I say that you guys built this with us, I actually mean that.
You guys were a key piece of us building this and that's what's so cool.
Not only do we have viewers and fans that heard me through the pipes, man, you heard me,
you heard the message and you said, "I wanna get in on that."
Oh, and Marcus, I forgot about Marcus, who is also a key part of this as long as I'm talking about
fans and viewers that were investors, like people who I've met in real life and broken bread with
who were like, "Yeah, Dave, "I think you're doing something decent, how can I help?"
So you guys did it.
I handed that phone around the table.
People were like, holy cow, this is incredible.
I was just watching them scroll and scroll and scroll.
This is amazing.
And all my push notifications.
You guys are getting messages.
There's no hate on here.
Pretty awesome, pretty awesome.
So I'm so proud of what we've built, and I truly mean we when I say that.
So let me get to some questions, then I'll share a couple other thoughts.
And as I said, if you're in the rubinreport.locals.com chat right now, which of course you can get on iOS app or on Android, or if you're on desktop, I'm more than happy to answer anything about this.
Whatever you got, throw it at me.
I'm just looking at the screen and they're gonna throw me some questions.
B Kunz says, couldn't be more pumped on the news for you and everyone involved.
Absolutely love this app and Rumble is incredible.
Hell of a combo.
I appreciate it.
Well, we're mission aligned, right?
Like that's the key thing here.
We were not, I'm telling you, we had cash offers to buy the company.
I could have just walked with a lot of cash.
We had other sort of interesting offers, but we wanted to further the mission.
Like what's the point of me talking all day about politics and free speech and all of this stuff?
If we were to sell to a company that was just gonna disassemble it or just take, you know, basically fleece it for parts or whatever, it's like I know for a fact That Locals is stronger today.
And we will, I'm telling you, if you work at Patreon, you may want to send us a resume because we're coming for you.
And if you work at YouTube, you may want to send Rumble a resume because we're coming for you.
And we will, this is completely consistent with everything else I say in general, don't expect the government to save you anymore.
Okay?
They're not going to save you.
Yeah, there's some good governors.
DeSantis in Florida.
Oh, and I'll mention something about Florida in just a sec.
There are a couple good people who are fighting for the right ideas.
But don't think the people above you are going to save you.
You can save yourself.
And how do you do that?
You build new products.
Build new institutions.
Build new everything.
That's exactly what we're doing here.
And I know if we just have the people behind us.
This is a movement for the people.
It truly is.
That's what we're gonna keep building.
And everything that we've done, I mean, we beta tested this with my fans.
Like, everything that we've done is because of you guys.
Liberals Unite says, will you still have a YouTube presence?
Yes, absolutely!
Hey, YouTube!
Susan!
I'm gonna leverage the hell out of YouTube to drive traffic to Rumble and to Blaze TV.
And I wanna be very clear about something.
I love the guys at Blaze TV.
This in no way is in conflict with anything at the Blaze TV.
I love Tyler.
I love Gaston.
Everybody is great.
We're gonna keep working together.
I think there could be huge opportunities on that front as well as the whole ecosystem comes together.
But yeah, I intend on staying on YouTube for now because YouTube is still the place for discovery, right?
I still wanna bring in new people so that I can Talk about the things that I care about, hopefully enlighten people and continue to further the ideological mission that I'm working on over here.
But of course, I want to drive more viewers to Rumble and I want more subscribers to join us over at Locals.com.
And, you know, every Rumble creator is going to have immediate access to a Locals community.
That's how they'll be able to fund what they're doing.
They're thinking about all sorts of interesting stuff.
I think Chris has been teasing this out.
I think I'm not gonna get any trouble for this one, but I mean, Rumble's been thinking about doing 100% of ad revenue to the creators.
Like, we're really trying to rethink the entire thing.
Backup Never says, are you losing control of this platform?
What's to stop Rumble from selling to the dark side?
All right, great question, and I appreciate the honesty and the directness.
So am I losing control of this platform?
So me, Dave, will no longer be in control of in the most technical sense of that.
Asaf, who built this with me, is the CEO of Locals.
He remains the CEO of Locals.
Not only is he my brother-in-law, but I know the guy pretty well,
and he is completely mission aligned.
You know, we have all sorts of people on Locals right now who disagree with me politically.
There are plenty of people on Locals who don't like Dave Rubin at all, okay?
There are plenty of people, no doubt, on Rumble who don't like me.
That's okay.
We are not in this to censor people.
If you are on Rumble or you are on Locals and you are threatening to murder somebody or planning a terrorist attack, law enforcement is going to deal with you.
But beyond that, we are not here to police speech.
If you disagree with everything that I say, if you are a socialist Bernie-loving, NPC, genderless unicorn.
You are welcome on Rumble.
I'll even write you a note.
Welcome!
From Dave Rubin.
We'd be happy to have you.
But if you break the law of the United States, you know, you try to kill somebody, you've got a bigger problem than us.
So we are going to deal with the speech issues as cleanly and clearly as possible.
And by the way, on the local side of this, once you have a couple dollar buy-in on the subscription side, which the minimum on locals is $3 to start a community, mine is $5, I think Scott Adams is $7, we have some people that charge $15 a month.
Once you do that, 99.9% of the bad behavior is gone.
Because once people put a little skin in the game, once they say, hey, this thing has some value to me.
Their behavior gets better.
So there are all sorts of political opinions that are happening in the Rubin Report community, and I like when people disagree with me or I see people in the comment section going back and forth, but somehow we've managed to do it without the trolls, without the bots, without the endless hate.
We're actually building something.
Better, we really are.
Yes, absolutely.
You know, when you're building new institutions, you gotta build a lot of institutions.
You have to build cultural institutions, educational institutions.
I think we're gonna need some new political institutions, unfortunately, technological institutions, everything else.
So I don't have the full scope of exactly what Trump is doing, although I do know that him doing this SPAC to IPO thing a couple days ago and then the exploding valuation of this thing
is just incredible.
And he'll be able to buy all sorts of companies.
And I think this thing is much different than from the desk of Donald Trump.
Like he's really onto something real this time.
I think this offers huge opportunity, huge, as Donald would say, huge opportunity for all of us.
I love competition.
It's not just something I say.
It's like, man, if Trump starts building something and then they've got amazing programming and amazing tech and all that, it's like, I have no doubt I'm gonna end up on a Zoom call with Chris and Asaf and Dan, and we're gonna go, boy, they're doing some good stuff over there.
Should we talk to those guys?
Can we work together?
Can we buy them?
Can they buy us?
Can we figure out all the pieces here To just continue to get the off-ramp from big tech in a sensible fashion.
That's really, that's it.
Lynn1966 says, how will this affect my subscription on Locals?
It will not affect it at all.
Locals will continue to operate as is.
As I said, we're gonna have more resources now.
So I think there's things that we're going to be able to build more quickly than we have.
I think we've done a pretty great job.
You know, every time I promise something, we did it.
First live text chat, live video chat, et cetera, et cetera.
But we will have plenty of resources now to build things faster, use the Rumble infrastructure
to secure all of our properties, but nothing will change on the local side in that regard.
I will say that we are working on the locals bundle.
I know you guys have been asking us for this for about a year, and it's something
that we know we have to do at some point.
And what I mean by bundle is, let's say, you like Dave Rubin, you like Scott Adams, you like Tulsi Gabbard, you like Bridget Phetasy and Michael Malice.
Well, if you're paying five bucks for all of those people, that adds up very quickly.
So we're trying to figure out a bundle package.
It's obviously very complex to do because if you have a whole bunch of different creators who maybe somebody's bigger than somebody else, do they get a higher cut?
We have a couple models for it.
We're working on it.
To be totally transparent, we were a little sidetracked with I'm dealing with a lot of lawyers over the last couple months.
But yes, we do plan on getting back to that.
Amy B. says, are you gonna do an Orlando meetup this weekend at the National Conservatism Conference?
Yes, there will be a Locals booth.
So Locals is sponsoring it.
It's really in conjunction with Rumble at this point.
We are sponsoring the event.
I'm gonna do tons of interviews.
And they have an incredible speaker line up there.
Peter Thiel.
J.D.
Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Chris Rufo, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
There's just like, give me a couple other names that are gonna be there.
So I'm gonna be interviewing people.
I will be there the entire time.
I'm speaking on November 2nd.
I'm closing the event.
Teal's speaking on the 31st.
But I will be there the entire time.
We'll figure out a meetup and hopefully I can do a meetup, you know, get some drinks with you But you find people in Miami.
Oh, Glenn Lowry will be there, Saurabh Amari, Josh Hawley.
It's a Rubin Report reunion, basically.
Kate in Arizona, any chance of Rumble moving to Miami with locals?
Oh, I'm glad you asked this question because...
You know, I just did the Locals exclusive livestream this morning, and one thing that kept coming up was that a lot of people were concerned that Rumble, as it stands so far, is a Canadian company, and obviously Canada has not been friendly on the free speech front.
That is absolutely true, and it's a great question.
I'm glad so many people asked.
So I don't want to say anything specific, but I've heard a rumor Who told me this rumor?
Was it you?
Was it you, was it you?
Somebody around here told me a rumor that Rumble might be moving to the Sunshine State.
I've said too much.
So I don't think you're gonna have to worry about that sort of thing.
Florida is the sunshine state.
By the way, you don't have to Google it.
There's a lot of sun.
It's very sunny, humid.
So Locals is already in Miami.
I sense that perhaps if these rumors, you know, if you hear something online, it's gotta be true.
So I would imagine that it is possible that Rumble's gonna head down there and we shall see what happens.
But you don't, The real answer on that, joking aside, is you do not have to worry about any of the ridiculous, the really ridiculous and draconian laws that Canada has around free speech.
And they're really coming for the internet.
They're coming for the creators.
You don't have to worry about that.
You really don't.
John says, so when are you finally going to leave California?
I am going to Florida next week for this event that I just mentioned, and then I am staying for some days after, so you can read into that what you will, you know?
I mean, I don't wanna start a rumor.
You know how these rumors go when they're on the computer.
They start spreading like wildfire.
Next thing you know, CNN's calling you a misinformation assassin.
unidentified
Gotta watch out for that.
I think that's most of it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I think that's most of it.
I do want to say, not only I think I started with this and I said it in the live stream earlier, but I'm incredibly humbled today.
I didn't intend on doing any of this.
because I just say what I think for a living.
People seem to gravitate to that.
And then, as I said, then suddenly when I had a project, people were like, "I'd like to put money
"towards that project.
"I'd like to help promote that project."
We met coders who were like, "I'd like to work for free."
We always make sure we pay people 'cause I don't want people to work for free.
I believe work has value and people should get paid for their work.
Um...
But, you know, we built a company that we moved down to a state that I think is doing things right in a city that I think is doing things right.
If you haven't seen my interview with Miami Mayor Suarez, you should check it out.
Like they're really building the new Silicon Valley there.
And I really do believe this, guys.
We can win this thing.
You know, David beat Goliath.
And the big tech situation, I know it feels like a lie.
It feels like they own all of us.
They could destroy all of us.
Everyone's feeling in every part of their life right now.
I think everyone is sort of feeling, ah, something's not right with the world.
The media lies to us.
Big tech manipulates us.
They want to inject my children with things.
They tell us masks don't work because you touch your face more.
And then they tell us to double mask.
Like everything Yeah, there's a couple people that don't like me.
unidentified
It's true.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
"shit right now, and I do what I do to help clean it up, "and the world in that regard has been pretty good to me.
"Yeah, there's a couple people that don't like me, "it's true, and you know, nobody's perfect."
But as I built this thing, I was able to take all of the things that I've learned, all of the ideas,
sitting down with a great economist like Thomas Sowell, a legend,
Sitting down with Thomas Sowell, not only did it change my feeling on economics, Right.
But it also then was like, all right, maybe I should start a business.
Maybe I should put some of this stuff into practice.
And that's exactly what we did.
So every time a door closed at, you know, in Silicon Valley and when I mentioned like, you know, going in and just people, you know, companies that had billions of dollars that could have just thrown, you know, blown us out through the roof immediately when they said no for all the wrong reasons.
And you know who the cowards are.
Like, I know, I got a mental list now of who the cowards are and who the brave people are.
And it's like, I want to work with brave people.
I want to work with people who have a mission, who want to accomplish something, but not just anything, right?
Like, the lefties and the people who are here to Silence us.
They're on a mission.
That's not the mission I want to be on.
I want to be on a mission with a team of people who want to free us, who want you to live how you see fit, who want to be proud of this great country and all of the freedoms that it has brought all of us.
I know that's what we're doing here with the Rumble team.
Like I'm telling you, I know these guys now.
We've had enough discussions about this stuff.
We would not have sold otherwise.
I did not need to do this.
I did not.
I enjoy the work, okay?
This came to us, and I think the best is yet to come.
I really do.
And all of us, for you guys that are part of this, it's like, you know, I did a video a couple years ago, about two years ago, called Bravery Deficit for PragerU.
And it's like, if right now, if you're feeling good after watching this, right?
If you're like, man, there's some good stuff happening.
It's like, figure out how to incorporate that into your life.
Whether that's somebody at work saying something to you and you actually saying something back instead of not saying it.
Whatever that means to you.
If you're getting a diversity, inclusion, and equity memo at your office, turning it around and saying to the HR guy, you know, this is racist.
I'm not a racist and I don't believe in this.
You know, they can't fire all of us.
They can't silence all of us.
They can't just crush all of us.
And now they really can't because we are gonna have technological answers to that.
So, on this Tuesday, I thank you guys for watching, and as I have many, many times said to my crew in this room, and as I have many times said to the Locals team, we're just right back at the beginning again.
Because now it's like, on one hand this morning, like when I saw that the press release ran out, and I was like, alright, it's done, it's free, it's out there in the world, there was this like, sort of exhale, but now it's like, now we got work to do.
So I'm ready to work.
And I thank you guys for being on this adventure with me.
We will continue to build out all of the right tech while we fight for the right ideas.
And I look forward to being on the adventure with you.
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